After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, the reaction was swift. Hillary Clinton mocked candidates who use “bluster and bigotry.” Jeb Bush insisted the idea was “foolish.” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, tweeted: “You can’t carpet bomb an insurgency out of existence. This is just silly.”
When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer objected that Cruz’s proposal would lead to lots of civilian casualties, the senator retorted somewhat incoherently: “You would carpet bomb where ISIS is — not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed — and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.” PolitiFact drily noted that Cruz apparently didn’t understand what the process of carpet (or “saturation”) bombing entails. By definition, it means bombing a wide area regardless of the human cost.
By almost any standard Cruz’s proposal was laughable and his rivals and the media called him on it. What happened next? By all rights after such a mixture of inanity and ruthlessness, not to say bloody-mindedness against civilian populations, his poll numbers should have begun to sag. After all, he’d just flunked the commander-in-chief test and what might have seemed like a test of his humanity as well. In fact, his poll numbers actually crept up. The week before the imbroglio, an ABC opinion poll had registered him at 15% nationally. By the following week, he was up to 18% and one poll even had him at a resounding 24%.
How to explain this? While many factors can affect a candidate’s polling numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can’t be overlooked when it comes to reactions to Cruz’s comments: by and large, Americans don’t think or care much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by the United States “carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital,” Sana’a. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this is the first time you’ve heard about the HRW findings.
You might think that this is because the conflict in Yemen is off our national radar screen. But how much attention have Americans paid to U.S. air strikes and bombing runs in Iraq? Washington has literally been bombing Iraq on and off for twelve years and yet few have taken much notice. That helps explain why bombing is such an attractive option for Washington any time trouble breaks out in the world. Americans don’t seem to care much what goes on when our bombs or missiles hit the ground. As pollsters found recently, a surprising number of Americans even want to bomb places that can’t be found on a map. When Public Policy Polling asked GOP voters in mid-December if they favored bombing Agrabah, 30% said they did (as did 19% of Democrats), while only 13% opposed the idea. Agrabah is the fictional city featured in the Disney movie Aladdin.
Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?
Support bombing Agrabah…………………….. 30%
Oppose bombing Agrabah……………………… 13%
Not sure………………………………………………… 57%
That 57% were “not sure” might be considered at least modestly (but not wildly) reassuring.
Why Cruz’s Numbers Went Up
History suggests that this blanket bloodthirstiness or at least lack of empathy for those on the other end of America’s bombing campaigns isn’t new. In March 1951, nine months into the Korean War, Freda Kirchwey, a crusading liberal journalist at the Nation, expressed bewilderment at American indifference to the fate of Korean civilians killed by our bombs. The destruction was awful. Little was left standing, structurally speaking, in North Korea. Nothing, she complained in a column, “excuses the terrible shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy land and naval artillery.” And yet few seemed bothered by it.
Because she was an optimist Kirchwey expressed the hope that Americans would eventually come to share her own moral anguish at what was being done in their name. They never did. If anything, the longer the war ground on, the less Americans seemed interested in the fate of the victims of our bombing.
Why did they show so little empathy? Science helps provide us with an answer and it’s a disturbing one: empathy grows harder as distances — whether of status, geography, or both — increase. Think of it as a matter of our Stone Age brains. It’s hard because in many circumstances an empathic response is, in fact, an unnatural act. It is not natural, it turns out, for us to feel empathy for those who look different and speak a different language. It is not natural for us to empathize with those who are invisible to us, as most bombing victims were and are. Nor is it natural for us to feel empathy for people who have what social scientists call “low status” in our eyes, as did the Korean peasants we were killing. Recent studies show that, faced with a choice of killing a single individual to save the lives of several people, we are far more apt to consider doing it if the individual we are sacrificing is of such low status. When subjects in an experiment are told that high-status people are being saved, the number willing to let the low-status victim die actually increases.
Another social science finding helps us understand why empathy is often in short supply and why Ted Cruz is capable of cavalierly recommending we carpet bomb Syrians living under the control of the Islamic State. Once we have convinced ourselves of the necessity and correctness of bombing the hell out of a country — as Americans did during the Korean War and as we are now doing in our war against IS — the wiring in our Stone Age brain helps us overcome any hint of guilt we might be inclined to feel over the ensuing loss of life. It quite naturally acts to dehumanize the distant victims of our air strikes.
This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance. Our brain hates to feel torn between conflicting emotions. Instead it rationalizes doing what we want to do by discounting any feeling that gives rise to negative emotions, in this case, guilt. An extreme example of this was what happened when the Nazis decided to stigmatize Jews and later wipe them out. From the moment they began their ruthless anti-Semitic campaigns, they used hideous imagery to convince other Germans that Jews were not, like them, human at all, but little different than rats. It is, of course, far easier to kill someone, or to sit by while others do the same, if you dehumanize them first. Rather than feeling empathy for the downtrodden Jews, many Germans felt contempt and disgust, strong emotions that swamped whatever other feelings they might have had.
In a study a few years ago, researchers measured the activity in the brains of subjects looking at pictures of homeless people. The finding was shocking. Brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain where empathy is often registered, was significantly lower than normal. Put another way, the subjects in this experiment literally paid the homeless no (or at least less) mind.
This may sound cruel and uncaring, but as far as biology is concerned it makes sense. Our genes, as the biologist Richard Dawkins has taught us, are “selfish”; they are, that is, built to enhance their own replication, which is, in effect, their biological imperative. Caring for people who are low in status, particularly those who belong to another tribe, doesn’t serve this imperative. Indeed, it may interfere with it by diverting the attention of the host — that’s you and me — from activities that will enhance our survival.
Think of this as our Stone-Age brains in action. It’s not that we necessarily make a conscious decision to ignore the fate of people who are low in status. Our brain does this automatically and seamlessly for us. Out of conscious awareness it decides if someone is useful to us. If that person is, our brain quickly achieves a state of hyper-attentiveness: our nostrils flare, our eyes widen, and our ears tune in relevant sounds. Think of what happens when you’re in the presence of somebody important and you’ll know what I mean. If someone is deemed useless to us? Unless we’re worried that they hyperpose a threat, our brain tells our body to relax.
Because it is in our biological interest to feel empathy for people from our own tribe and family — those, that is, in a position to either enhance our survival or perpetuate our genes — we come equipped with mechanisms to help us distinguish our people from outsiders. From the moment we’re born, we focus on those around us and bond with them. A mother and child know each other through smell. Brother and sister recognize each other’s familiar facial features.
When we hear someone speaking a foreign language, we instinctively discount their humanity. This was shown in a 2014 experiment designed to determine if human beings were more willing to sacrifice someone who spoke a different language in order to save the lives of several others. The findings were clear-cut. Only 18% of the subjects in the experiment were willing to make the cold calculation that saving the lives of several people at the cost of one life was “fair” when the intended victim shared their native language. However, that percent more than doubled when it was revealed that the person to be sacrificed spoke a foreign language. The experiment’s results remained the same whether that language was Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English, or Spanish.
Why Stories Matter When It Comes to American War
You may be beginning to wonder if we aren’t doomed to eternal indifference to the human beings who suffer when we loose our Air Force on them, but science offers us a modicum of hope on the subject. In recent years, one of the strongest findings is that storytelling can break through our indifference and foster empathy even for distant peoples who might otherwise seem alien to us. This more than anything else gives us the ability to empathize with those with whom we don’t identify demographically or otherwise. Stories hold our attention, while feeding the strong urge to find meaningful patterns in human behavior.
As scientists have now demonstrated in experiments, the brain is a natural pattern finder. It wants one and one to equal two. Mysterious may be the will of God, but here on Earth we expect behavior to be explicable. Stories are designed to establish cause and effect, and once we understand what motivates people we can usually find a way to empathize with them.
Stories connect us to people in a way nothing else can. It’s the reason politicians regularly tell stories on the campaign trail. Years ago, Harvard social scientist Howard Gardner set out to discover what highly successful leaders have in common. After reviewing the lives of 11 luminaries, from Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King, Jr., he concluded that their success depended to a remarkable extent on their ability to communicate a compelling story or, as he put it, “narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed.” These stories, he found, “constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal.”
When people are reduced to numbers — as were the civilian victims of air power during the Korean War and as are the civilians who become “collateral damage” in American air strikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere — we don’t feel their pain, nor do we automatically put ourselves in their shoes, which is by definition what you do when you are feeling empathic. We have the bomber pilot’s syndrome. We don’t feel anything for the victims below.
This is one reason why antiwar movements matter. They tell stories about the victims of war. It was striking in the Vietnam years, for instance, how many Americans came to care for, say, a small naked Vietnamese girl napalmed near her village, or so many other Vietnamese civilians who suffered under a rain of American bombs, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells. The stories that the massive antiwar movement regularly told here about the distant world being decimated by the U.S. war machine created a powerful sense of empathy among many, including active-duty American soldiers and veterans of the war, for the plight of the Vietnamese. (It helped that few Americans believed that North Vietnam posed an existential threat to the United States. Fear brings out the worst in us.)
Storytelling happens to be in every human’s toolkit. We are all born storytellers and attentive listeners. Biology may incline us to turn a cold eye on the suffering of people we can’t see and don’t know, but stories can liberate us. Ted Cruz may be able to build up his poll numbers by promising to carpet bomb foreigners in the Middle East of whom we are fearful, but at least we know that biology doesn’t have to dictate our response. Our brains don’t have to stay in the Stone Age. Stories can change us, if we start telling them.
Rick Shenkman is the editor and founder of the History News Network and the author most recently of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016).
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7 Comments
It’s funny how both Joseph Val and Kelvin Yearwood both dismiss the above article so quickly and in some sense arrogantly, yet, seem to ignore the fact that both of them acknowledge the use of ‘story telling’ or ‘narrative’ building in actively manipulating people into believing “this shite”.
That is really the point of the article. Both Val and Yearwood also point out that they actively utilise alternative stories in order to build a truer picture of the world and gain a better understanding if how it works. Such ‘stories’ or ‘naratives’ help in building compassion that extends out beyond one’s closer relations. Or perhaps their testosterone levels are just far far lower than others allowing for greater compassion, apparently an evolutionary advantage for building a compassionate society according to a couple of articles I read.
One or even two articles such as those linked by Val don’t prove the opposite of what the article suggests but merely point to another view. In fact the above article isn’t so much making the point about us having a ‘stoneage’ mind as us being manipulated by ‘stories’ and having the ability to access or develop other ‘stories’ that aid in developing greater compassion, which in fact Val’s and Yearwood’s comments testify to. One could argue till one is blue in the face about the existence of a “stoneage” mind or not but even Val avknowledges, somewhat bemused, that “people believe this shite?”, which does suggest that “story” can constrain compassion to closer, more familiar surroundings which further suggests at least a mental capacity to be duped when, perhaps, closer “tribal” concerns are raised as threatened.
Even in non-scientific “spiritual” practice like Buddhism, there is acknowledgement, without research other than anecdotal, that compassion among peoples is often restricted to closer boundaries (regardless of scientific evidence that may or may not prove testosterone levels have lessened since 50,000 years ago) .Hence why there is a meditation practice called Tonglen. A meditation designed to develop and widen one’s compassion out and far beyond one’s more immediate relations and concerns. May seem stupid, even idiotic, when placed beside the articles Val has linked or right science, but it seems that both Val and Yearwood have both, like active Tonglen practitioners, pursued different stories and narratives to “try to get actively beyond the socialization process in an age of corporate capital hyper-commodity fetishism and atomization and understand what is going” on that also helps build or activate a wider compassion and not allow themselves to succumb to the ones perpetuated by state sponsored media and “leaders”, which also seems to be the main point, all be it a simple one, of the article above.
Well done by both of you, you have overcome your “stoneage” brain.
Don’t start, it’s just a metaphor.
“to which in fact Val’s and Yearwood’s comments testify.” Not, “which in fact…testify to.” Bloody prepositions. I try so hard.
Hi James, I don’t actively search out alternative narratives because I think I have a stone-age brain. It’s a key difference.
“Stoneage brain” as with “selfish gene” are not only bad metaphors, they are profoundly misleading metaphors.
Is your “testosterone level” phrase another metaphor?
We are clearly not simply free to become what we damn well like – there are inherited limits to what human beings can ever do, but all these metaphors are exceptionally constrictive in their tone and in the abuse of their usage – especially the stoneage one which has often been used by the west to justify, in a Lockean way, the dispossession of aboriginal peoples.
Hi Kelvin,
Ok, I’ll concede on the stoneage brain metaphor. Could have been better or not used at all. For me the article carries some weight re stories and narratives. I agree you don’t actively seek out stuff because you are trying to get on top of some stoneage brain, but you are actively seeking out alternative stuff that does counter other narratives that could or do seem to limit one’s ability to empathise…the shite Val mentions.
I also agree we are more than likely limited in our capacities, as Chomsky suggests, but that the ability to extend the field of one’s empathy seems to counter the limiting notion of some “stoneage brain”. Access to greater information and different stories to those offered by state sponsered media propaganda aids in this and seems, at least to me, the main, yet simple point of the essay rather than whether or not there is some evolutionary limiting factor at play. I think.
I might suggest that we are more apt to be insensitive to the fate of others because of the status of propaganda in our lives. Please read “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James W. Loewen. He compares and contrasts the most popular American history texts. The results are undeniable that we teach a feel-good history that serves to deny young people lessons that serve to prevent repetition of gross errors. Add that to Stanley Migram’s “Study of Obedience,” and we get a handbook for acquiescence. Yes, the stories: historical, mythological and fictional affect us. Joseph Campbell suggested the need for a myth that is more inclusive than the ones that have not served to stem the self-destructive instincts of our species.
Of course, violence and militarism are the American way. These raise their ugly heads in camouflage garments, Humvie vehicles, fly overs at ball games, video games and program after program with guns, guns, guns and the police blotter news programs that promote unbridled fear.
What to do. Obviously, it is important to foster a system of governance that does not allow psychopaths and toadies to percolate to the top. Ours is not such a system. It would help if our god was not the almighty dollar as well.
“Two wolves fight in our hearts. One is angry, the other compassionate. Which on will win? THE ONE WE FEED!”
couldn’t disagree with this article more
there is no such thing as a stone age brain
selfish genes are a figment of a sotted biologist’s brain…no names here…
genes do not express willy nilly/automatically: they express (or not) in response to cues from the larger external environment in which they exist…
an empathetic response is not an unnatural response: it is the basis of our survivability as a species: the ole survival of the fittist, ie the most aggressive and brutal is outdated and as wrong as it is/was convenient for maintaining the power status quo…the studies mentioned only indicate how we have been acculturated to respond to particular situations…prejudice is learned; it is not innate…one may as well read ardrey or morris for this sort of swill…hierarchy is unnatural for our species…we are taught to view others as ‘low’ or ‘high’ status; not actively: we take it is passively from how the adults around us act when we are children…children learn to ape (!) the prejudices of their parents, uncritically in most cases…so most of this post is junk…
why is cruz gaining?…why would a carpet-bomber gain in polls?…one only need watch the news for a minute or so to figure that one out…we’re terrorised by our media, our newscasters continually…i don’t watch tv, so when i do see a news program i’m shocked at the outright lies being dished out by people reading teleprompters…the spin on daily events is mind-boggling, and depressing…people believe this shite?…apparently they do…faced with such threats to our lives as isis sleeper cells and black murderers apparently everywhere, is it any wonder bombing others seems an appropriate action?…we’re surrounded by ‘others’ out to kill us, perpetually…that’s the story we hear on the news…so i don’t know why this guy is dredging up all this junk science to answer a query that is quite obvious to anyone who takes the time to resist cultural brainwashing on a daily basis…
http://archive.unews.utah.edu/news_releases/did-lower-testosterone-help-civilize-humanity/
linked article suggests pretty much the exact opposite of most of the garbage ‘science’ we’ve been spoon-fed for decades now about how we, as a species, developed…
time to dust off the Ashley Montagu tomes and do away with all this neanderthal rubbish that’s been so trendy these past few decades…
The pre-Vietnam slaughter in Korea is well to bring to people’s attention.
But putting it down to stone-age brains and selfish genes is simply wrong.
It takes saturating, corporate propaganda to turn people into weary, bomb-fevered thoughtless individuals.
And as long as there are many people who do not succumb to this contemporary, manufactured ennui, one would have to posit that there are at least two types of stone-age brain and two types of selfish gene mechanisms. A project that’s not worth the trouble as, on closer inspection there would inevitably have to be further models added to account for varied human behaviors.
My brain does not have a problem at all with empathizing with people around the other side of the world because I try to get actively beyond the socialization process in an age of corporate capital hyper-commodity fetishism and atomization and understand what is going on, like so many people I know.